General Art Resources
- Android Arts : A comprehensive yet concise tutorial on the arts
- CG Textures: Requires an account, but free
- Game Icons: Free icons for your use
- Open Game Art: Textures and sprites!
Art Tools
Adobe Photoshop
It’s photoshop. The professional standard for many artists. Not free, but there are student discounts available at an affordable rate.
Krita
Krita is an open source painting program designed by artists. It has highly customizable brushes and a wrapping mode that is very useful for making tiling textures.
Krita Resources
- Introduction to Krita: A 12 minute introduction to the basics
- Krita Game Art Series: GDquest covers the basics of Krita in 5-10 minute long videos.
- Krita Brushes for game artists: GDquest’s custom brushes. 23 free, more available for purchase.
- Krita Brushkit: A collection of free brushes for Krita.
Gimp
A free alternative to photoshop. Steep learning curve, but feature rich. Protip: turn on single window mode.
Inkscape
Opensource vector art program. Great if you are looking to make assets that can easily be scaled to any resolution without losing quality.
Aseprite
A fully featured pixel art and animation tool. Retro UI design. Excellent for making animated sprites with features such as onion skin and sprite sheet exporting.
Pyxel edit
Another great pixel art and animation tool. Modern UI design. Different feature set than Aseprite. Very handy for making tilemaps and testing level design with tile modes.
Maya
One of the industry standards for making high quality 3d assets and animations. Free for 3 years while a student.
Blender
Blender is a free 3D modeling program. It has a steep learning curve, but it is a very capable alternative to expensive software. Blender has its own built in game engine, but most people will use another game engine with the assets that were made in blender.
Blender Resources
- Blender Cheatsheet: Print this off and keep it with you at all times.
- BlenderArtists forum: There are pleny of things here for new users, but if you try to start an MMORPG thread, they will kill you.
- Blender Cookie: Run by the same guys as BlenderArtists; more on the modeling/rendering side than game dev
- Blender Guru: A little easier to understand for the novice, but has some helpful tips; more on the modeling/rendering side than game dev
- Other Blender Tutorials: Great for people who know the basics, but want to expand into some basic skillsets